Richard Spencer is one of the Daily Telegraph's Middle East correspondents. Married with three children, he was previously news editor, and then China correspondent for six years. He is based in Cairo.

Decoration of shame

Some of you may have spotted a story that was on the website yesterday about the battle between the Chinese censors and Zhang Yihe, the author whose last three books have all been banned.

Zhang Yihe fights Chinese censorship

There was a furore about the most recent, Past Stories of Peking Opera Stars, when it was on a list of eight banned books. A lot was written on -and removed from – websites; a lot more appeared in the overseas Chinese press.

Anyway, on Monday, as I was interviewing her, a decision was made to remove the chief books (and newspaper and internet) censor Long Xinmin from his position. He was put into a backroom role.

Of course, you can't necessarily connect that to the row. We know so little about how these decisions are made. There were rumours of financial irregularities. Nevertheless, there was some suggestion that his judgment had been called into question.

His replacement, interestingly, was head of propanda – PR chief – at the Communist Youth League when President Hu Jintao was in charge there in the 1980s. It could just be that Hu wanted one of his trusted sidekicks in charge of this increasingly important and difficult area.

Anyway, that was that. Until today, when the following fact was drawn to my attention: Mr Long, only this month, was awarded the Legion d'honneur by the French ambassador to China.

It's not up to me to dictate to the French any more than the Chinese what they do, of course. Mr Long's title was director of the General Administration of Press and Publication, so the rationale - that he had presided over the translation of French books into Chinese, and overseen the expansion of rural libraries – is on the face of it logical enough.

But, is it really appropriate for an EU country, with all its commitments to free speech, human rights etc, for France, with its glorification of books and learning, to honour the man who sits/sat at the apex of a system of preventing and controlling the publication of books?

That's certainly not what Reporters Sans Frontieres thought: "A censor in the service of an authoritarian government should not be rewarded with a decoration intended for those who defend the French Republic's values," it said. It said Mr Long had overseen an intensification of censorship.

Pierre's readers were even more blunt. "C'est a vomir" I don't think I need to translate.

Of course, Jacques Chirac was a noted friend of China, and collector of Chinese art and objets (one other commenter suggested he must have wanted a new set of furniture).

But there may now be a backlash. Francois Bayrou, the defeated third party candidate in the French election, called for a boycott of the Olympics next year over the Sudan issue (which I will return to in a few days), and since they are going for his votes now the other candidates are also promising to stand up for human rights in China.

I don't know how much attention this story about the censor's honour will get back in France but I can't imagine that the idea would go down very well that a man who seems to have been regarded as too conservative for Communist China was OK by modern France. Could be tougher times ahead for China from its hitherto best friend in Europe.